Legislative Studies Quarterly最新文献

Scandals can cause serious damage to political parties’ brand name and reputation, which may taint all members of the party—even those not implicated in the scandal. In this article, we therefore explore how (uninvolved) politicians are likely to react to the eruption of such events. Building on a survey among UK local councilors (N = 2133), we first document the prevalence of distinct response strategies (such as distancing oneself from the scandal-hit party or redirecting attention to similar events in other parties). Then, building on a between-subject survey-experimental design, we assess the moderating roles of partisanship and scandal type. We show that a scandal in one’s own party reduces the probability of distancing oneself from the scandal-hit party (particularly among men). We also find that scandal type matters: pointing out similar scandals in other parties is less likely for sex scandals compared to financial scandals (particularly among women).

This article assesses the effect of changes in the lawmaking process on the success of the president’s legislative agenda, distinguishing between within-term success (bills that passed during the term) and overall success (including bills that passed after the president left office). With the 2064 presidential bills introduced in seven terms (1990–2018) in Chile’s presidential system, we assess the impact of changes in lawmaking rules on within-term (59.9%) and overall success (70.6%). Changes that decrease attributions of the president and create more opportunities for executive-legislative bargaining—including concurrent elections—increase the chances of success of presidential bills. The use of presidential urgency motions, an agenda-setting tool, makes bills more likely to pass, but the issuance of many urgency motions undermines the bill’s chances to succeed. Presidential bills introduced early in the term and those on issues where there is more policy convergence are more likely to pass.

Recent media reports imply that corporations, industry groups, and think tanks exercise outsized influence in state legislatures by promoting model legislation. Before making sweeping claims about how special interests dominate the legislative process, it is essential to compare their purported influence to that of other sources. This article performs such a comparison by applying textual analysis to two original datasets—one including over 2400 state bills that challenge 12 national policies and one including more than 1000 model bills. It finds that lawmakers are more likely to develop legislation internally or rely on legislation from other states than to use model bills. These results suggest that while special interests can sometimes exploit the safeguards of federalism to advance their partisan goals, that dynamic is far from the norm.

Do incumbents have an electoral advantage and if so, do these advantages differ across gender? In this study, I estimate the electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents in 10 Canadian federal elections, across 3059 ridings, from 1990 to 2021. Using a regression discontinuity design, I compare men and women who have very narrowly won or lost elections on three different indicators: propensity to run again, probability of winning the next election, and vote share. I find that women incumbents are just as likely to run again in subsequent elections as men incumbents. However, women who lose an election appear to be more likely to quit politics compared to men who lose an election. I do not find clear incumbency effects for probability of winning at the next election and vote share.

Affective polarization is pervasive in modern US politics, and can be intensified by strategic messaging from members of Congress. But there are gaps in our knowledge of the dynamics of polarizing appeals from elected representatives on social media. We explore the usage of polarizing rhetoric by members of Congress on Twitter using the 4.9 million tweets sent by members of Congress from 2009 to 2020, coded for the presence of polarizing rhetoric via a novel and highly accurate application of supervised machine learning methods. Fitting with our expectations, we find that more ideologically extreme members, those from safer districts, and those who are not in the president’s party are more likely to send polarizing tweets, and that polarizing tweets garner more engagement, increasing campaign funding for more polarizing members.

Despite increasing efforts to implement legislative gender quotas, many countries still encounter substantial popular opposition to this policy. Previous work cannot explain why opposition to legislative gender quotas persists, particularly among young men, a group believed to be open to diversity. We develop and test a theoretical framework linking group threat to men's attitudes toward legislative gender quotas. While the salience of perceived group threat could trigger men's opposition to legislative gender quotas, we expect that this effect will be more profound among young men due to the heightened degree of economic insecurity experienced by younger generations. Using original survey experiments in South Korea, this study demonstrates the strong influence of group threat in the formation of negative attitudes toward legislative gender quotas among young men. These effects, however, are not mediated by traditional gender norms. Our findings have significant implications for the study of gender and politics and democratic representation.

Studies on policy monitoring and ministerial survival within coalition governments are usually conducted separately. In this study, we bring these topics together and argue that the strategy of coalition partners to oversee the implementation of one another's policies has surprising consequences on the duration of office-holding ministers. Our main theoretical insight suggests that the degree to which ministers behave as faithful agents of the government depends on their expectations about their partners' monitoring behavior, such that when they expect to be under high scrutiny, they moderate their drifting behavior. Using evidence from legislative information requests on the activities of individual ministers over all multiparty cabinets formed in Brazil between 1995 and 2014, we demonstrate that: (1) greater policy monitoring by coalition partners is observed under more ideologically heterogeneous cabinets, and (2) more frequent policy-monitoring efforts by coalition partners lead to a lower ministerial replacement within the government term.

Members of Congress represent geographically demarcated districts embedded in subnational policy environments. Drawing on policy feedback literature and literature on congressional representation, I argue that, because of this institutional configuration, subnational policy adoption can affect national representation. More specifically, policy reforms in the states they represent can increase pressures members face from organized groups and individuals in their constituencies to promote aligned federal policies. Empirically, I examine the effects of state marijuana legalization. The inferential design leverages differences across the states in statewide citizen initiative institutions, which provides exogenous variation in legalization. Instrumental variables analysis indicates legalization influenced pro-marijuana bill sponsorship and roll calls in the 116th Congress. The evidence points to growing influence of industry in legalizing states—including the ability to mobilize employees and customers—as the key mechanism, thus underscoring the importance of a political economy perspective for studying interdependencies in American federalism.

When (and why) do legislators quit their jobs? Previous answers to this question have focused on retirements. Looking at voluntary resignations instead, in this article we argue that leaving Congress to assume an elected (executive) office or a position in the (sub)national bureaucracy may be a career-advancing move motivated by progressive ambition. We document this claim with data from Argentina, where roughly 12% of elected deputies leave voluntarily before their term ends, but rarely become unemployed. Consistent with expectations, we show that resignations tend to follow instances of executive alternation at the (sub)national level, and are driven by legislators placed at the top of party lists as well as those elected in midterm years.